Code Story | Startup Podcast for CTOs, CEOs and Technical Founders

Latest Episodes:

S13 Bonus: Spotting Property Red Flags using the "CARFAX" of Real Estate with Jeff Emalaba, Founder & CEO of InvestFusion Oct 14, 2026

Show notes

Jeff Emalaba has a background that has morphed into risk mitigation over the years. He has a professional background in options trading, risk management and auditing, along with over two decades of real estate investment. Jeff is also a licensed agent in North Carolina. Outside of tech and professional life, he enjoys reading and spending time with his family, taking vacations when time allows.

Years ago, Jeff invested $11k of his own money into a property. As it turned out, the investment opportunity had hidden foundation and structural defects. It was this experience that led him to look for a solution that analyzed hidden risks, appraisals, and property data - to be the Carfax for real estate.

This is the creation story of InvestFusion.

Links

https://www.investfusion.co/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-emalaba/

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

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S13 E8: Democratizing Real Estate: Fractional Wealth Building for Modern Investors with Alex Blackwood, CEO of Mogul Oct 13, 2026

Show notes

NEWS: Mogul Secures Oversubscribed $15.5M Series A Led by Draper Associates to Scale Its AI-Driven Real Estate Investing Platform

Alex Blackwood grew up in different areas of New Jersey and Connecticut. He had a transformational experience at boarding school in South Jersey, and eventually went to Georgetown on a rowing scholarship. Post college, he went to Goldman Sachs doing conventional investment banking, and eventually private equity. Outside of tech, he is married and loves to play and watch golf. He enjoys reading business books and science fiction. He notes that he can't do e-readers - he has to have the physical book in his hand, which helps his attention and retention.

In 2021, Alex bought his first single family rental after getting his real estate license. He notes that the process of buying this was pretty terrible, with 10+ different people scraping fees from the process. During his "garden time" - IE month off from investment banking - he put together a thesis and pitched his now co-founder, on a fractional ownership platform for real estate.

This is the creation story of Mogul.

Links

https://www.mogul.club/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-blackwood-a3996a135/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 Bonus: From Lab to Market: Scaling High-Growth Tech Startups with Caitlinn McMinn, Programs Director at TechFW Oct 08, 2026

Show notes

Today, we have a special episode of the Code Story podcast. Joining us today is Caitlinn McMinn, Executive Director at TechFW. TechFW is a nonprofit startup incubator in Fort Worth, TX. The group is here to prove that the next generation of world-changing companies begins right in the heart of Cowtown. In our conversation today, Caitlinn is going to elaborate on the incubators story and model, illuminating how the team supports local entrepreneurs through opportunity and community.

Questions:

TechFW operates on a 100% equity-free model for founders. In an incubator landscape where equity stakes are standard, why is retaining equity so vital for early-stage tech founders, and how does that alter the relationship between TechFW and its entrepreneurs?
TechFW has been fostering innovation in North Texas since 1998. Looking back over more than two decades, how has the Fort Worth startup landscape evolved, and what core principles have allowed TechFW to remain a constant anchor for local founders?
People talk about 'entrepreneurial ecosystems' all the time, but what does a thriving ecosystem actually look like on the ground in a city like Fort Worth, and what is its most fragile component?
TechFW recently partnered with Texas Woman’s University to launch ThinkLab OnDemand, alongside close ties with local institutions like UNT Health Science Center and Texas A&M Fort Worth. How do university partnerships feed the innovation pipeline, and what advice do you have for regions trying to bridge academia and entrepreneurship?
Through Cowtown Angels, TechFW bridges early-stage founders with local angel investors. How do you cultivate an angel investor community that is willing to back early-stage, high-risk tech ventures right here in North Texas?
Through ThinkLab, you help founders test viability early. What is the single biggest misconception first-time founders have when transitioning an idea into a validated business model?
Startups often move fast and break things, but scaling on top of weak processes can be fatal. In the FastForward program, how do you help founders balance aggressive growth with operational rigor?
Founder isolation is real. How does TechFW build peer-to-peer community so founders don't feel like they're navigating the journey entirely alone?
Your career spans finance, sales enablement, HR systems, and operations consulting before stepping into the Executive Director role at TechFW. How does having that 360-degree operational background shape how you diagnose what a startup actually needs versus what they think they need?
Running an innovation hub requires balancing the needs of founders, community donors, corporate sponsors, and board members. How do you keep 'founder-first' as the North Star while managing those stakeholder dynamics?
Fort Worth and the broader DFW metroplex are seeing massive economic growth. What unique advantages does Fort Worth offer tech startups compared to traditional hubs like Silicon Valley or Austin?
As technology evolves rapidly—from AI to biotech and manufacturing—how is TechFW expanding access so underrepresented founders and non-traditional entrepreneurs can participate in the tech economy?
If an ecosystem builder or civic leader in another mid-sized city was listening today and wanted to spark a tech community from scratch, what is the very first step they should take?

Links

https://www.techfortworth.org/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/caitlin-mcminn/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 Bonus: Automating Local Lead Growth: High-Intent Prospecting & AI Verification with David Moore, Founder & CEO of Stalex.ai Oct 07, 2026

Show notes

David Moore started day trading when he was 16, along with his brother. By the age of 19, he had a 7 figure portfolio, indicating some solid success. He did some angel investing, and then moved into entrepreneurship, starting a few companies. But eventually, got into a sales role that led to his current venture. Outside of tech, he loves music, and in particular, is really enjoying 15th century classical music. He has a lazy French bulldog, enjoys Italian food, and finds himself either reading Octavian literature, or - his bible.

David got into a sales job for a friend of his, and in doing so, build some tools using AI to help in the business. When he shared these ideas, and eventually was replaced by an offshore resource, he and his brother took off to build their own thing - a solution to help your business score leads.

This is the creation story of Stalex.

Links

https://stalex.ai/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/stalexai/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 E7: The AI Legal Shift: Giving SME Law Firms BigLaw Leverage with Dave Berner, Co-Founder & CEO of Parachute Oct 06, 2026

Show notes

Back in August of 2025, Dave Berner joined the podcast previously in Season 11, episode 11, as the co-founder and CTO of Kinde. A past musician, he took up web development to make his bands websites and his friend's myspace profiles. Fast forward, he has started multiple startups, been the host of several podcasts, and is married with 3 kids.

Dave's co-founder Ryan experienced firsthand that legal AI tools were built for massive law forms. SMB's or boutiques were forced to retrofit expensive, enterprise heavy software to their workflows (and of course, budgets). Alongside their third co-founder, Vivienne, they set out to build an AI-powered legal OS designed for firms with 1 to 200 lawyers.

This is the creation story of Parachute.

Links

https://goparachute.ai/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/daveberner

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 Bonus: The AI Marketing Cloud: Harnessing Predictive Intent to Scale Growth with Christian Monberg, CTO of Zeta Global Oct 05, 2026

Show notes

Christian Monberg is originally from a small town in central Maine. His mother was a mathematician, which meant he got into engineering fairly young. This lead him to attend school for engineering, and pursue a career in tech and become a true technologist. Outside of tech, he is married with 2 kids and lives in San Francisco with his family. He likes to re-build old engines, and loves to fly. In fact, some of his favorite flights were through the Grand Canyon at sunset, or seeing Vegas from a plane. In addition, he likes to sail, and is always attempting to tinker with his boat, and sail with his friends and family.

Chris prior company was focused on AI and marketing, and eventually, they were acquired by their now parent company. A lot of the hard earned lessons that he and his team learned through their journey still applied in this age of AI, so much so that it became the backbone of how Zeta built and deployed their products.

This is Chris' creation story at Zeta Global.

Links

https://www.zetaglobal.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrismonberg/

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 Bonus: Scaling Real-Time Search Data: Secure APIs for AI Infrastructure with Alaa Abdulridha, Engineering Director at SerpApi Oct 01, 2026

Show notes

Alaa Abdulridha is from souther Iraq, but now lives in Austin, TX. Post wars in Iraq, the country had poor infrastructure, which got him interested in building and creating things to better and secure his life. He left the country to study, and ended up in Germany as a security engineer. Outside of tech, he enjoys playing RPG video games. In particular, he likes to play World of Warcraft, and enjoys the open world, and character development from scratch.

Alaa's current company was built to scrape google search engines, in order to get around a blocker for a prior project. In the past, he used to participate in bug bounty hunting during University, and wrote about his exploits. His now founder's came across his articles, and invited him to joint the company.

This is Alaa's creation story at SerpApi.

Links

https://serpapi.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alaa0x2/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 Bonus: The AI SAST Shift: Eliminating Vulnerability Backlogs with Santiago Castiñeira, Co-Founder & CTO of Maze Sep 30, 2026

Show notes

Santiago Castineira has quite the background in international living. He was born in Argentina, but grew up in Spain, then moved to Sweden, San Francisco, and now llives in Germany. He did his grade school and university in Spain, but his masters program across Sweden, San Francisco, and Germany. He's worked in startups, bigger companies, and eventually founding and is leading his own. Outside of tech, he is a Dad of 3 kids, so he stays quite busy when he isn't working. He loves endurance sports, running half marathons and long distance biking.

Santiago and his team were well aware of the fact that tens of thousands of new vulnerabilities are published every year. While security teams were drowning, the rise of automated coding agents were starting to ship code faster and faster. He and his team realized that there needed to be an agent driven platform, designed to evaluate and secure your system like a senior security engineer.

This is the creation story of Maze.

Links

https://mazehq.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/santiagocastineira/

Current Sponsors:

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 E6: The Spatial Web Shift: Building Decentralized AI Knowledge Graphs with Yaniv Tal, Co-Founder & CEO of Geo Sep 29, 2026

Show notes

Yaniv Tal grew up in the Bay Area in the 90's with parents who were engineers. They were both in electrical engineering, specifically digital/signal processing. He really saw the internet sport up into a massive thing. He studied the hard sciences (electrical engineering, math and physics), and his first job out of college was at HP, doing board b ring up for printers. Outside of tech, he is recently married, having a lovely wedding on a beach in Mexico. When asked "what do you do for fun?", he can't answer it, cause he is a bit of a workaholic and loves what he does. But, he does make sure he spends quality time with his new bride.

In 2017, Yaniv founded a protocol called The Graph, one of the core web3 protocols. After many years on this journey, he started to have a vision around the world's broader knowledge in a decentralized, verifiable way. Eventually, he and his team set out to launch a a solution around this vision, designed to solve fragmentation of knowledge, vulnerable to centralization, silos and misinformation.

This is the creation story of Geo.

Links

https://geobrowser.io

https://thegraph.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/yanivtal9/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

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Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.

S13 Bonus: The Enterprise AI Chip War: Rethinking LLM Silicon & Inference with Vasanth Mohan, Director of Product at SambaNova Sep 24, 2026

Show notes

Today, we welcome a special guest to the podcast, Vasanth Mohan, Head of Developer Relations and Product Marking at SambaNova.

SambaNova is transforming AI with efficiency, security and sovereignty, driven by their relentless pursuit of intelligence, and running the largest models by maximizing dataflow efficiency. Vasanth and I dig into some fun - and heavy - topics at the backbone of where the industry is going with AI Inference, specifically at the hardware layer.

Questions:

Tell me and the audience a bit about you and SambaNova.
The Shift to Autonomy: "When we shift from a user generating a single chat response to an autonomous coding agent executing dozens of background tool calls, loop checks, and file rewrites, how does the underlying inference profile change, and what metric breaks first?
Latency Budgets: "Token-per-second throughput used to be a nice-to-have metric for human readability, but for multi-agent workflows running in parallel, low latency is critical to prevent system timeouts. How are developers designing prompt structures and context windows to prevent compounding latencies during multi-agent orchestration?
Hardware Heterogeneity: "Hyperscalers historically standardized on monolithic hardware, but neoclouds are increasingly mixing high-memory GPUs, specialized inference ASICs, and custom interconnects. How do you decide the optimal hardware mix inside a rack when your customer demand fluctuates between massive long-context reasoning models and rapid edge-like decoding?
Power and Rack Density: "With high-end inference accelerators drawing massive power per node, how are neocloud data centers re-engineering liquid cooling, rack layouts, and power distribution specifically to maximize inference density rather than training throughput?
Decoupling Prefill and Decode: "Disaggregated inference splits compute-heavy prefill operations from memory-bandwidth-heavy decode operations onto distinct hardware pools. What are the biggest real-world friction points when deploying this in production—especially around KV-cache transfer overhead and inter-node networking?
Dynamic Orchestration: "In a disaggregated setup, workload spikes in long-context coding prompts can saturate the prefill pool while leaving decode nodes underutilized. How are leading engineering teams building smart routing layers and dynamic auto-scaling engines to balance compute across compute-bound and memory-bound hardware?
The Economic Tipping Point: "Enterprise adoption is oscillating between proprietary API-driven models and self-hosted open-weights models. At what scale—measured in inference volume, latency SLAs, or data privacy constraints—does it become economically imperative for a company to transition off closed APIs onto self-hosted open infrastructure?

Links

https://sambanova.ai/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/v-mohan/

Current Sponsors:

Checkout our Stacklist! https://stacks.codestory.co/

Check out our Patreon!

Hosted by Noah Labhart | Technical Founder & Startup Mentor.